The health industry is booming — and it's women driving the boom, according to the boss of one of Australia's top natural health companies.

Blackmores chairman Marcus Blackmore believes that while everyone is becoming more interested in health and wellness, it's a trend fuelled by women, and especially by mums.

"Women [generally have] the responsibility for looking after the family’s health," he told Coach. "If you’re bringing up kids, you sure in hell want to know what those kids are eating and what’s good for them."

Blackmore, 71, is a big, colourful character with a big voice — a side-effect of hearing loss sustained during the Vietnam War. I meet him on Sydney's northern beaches at the Blackmores campus, a lavish facility rich with greenery and running water.

It's a long way from the small natural health company founded by Maurice Blackmore, Marcus's father, in Brisbane in the late 1930s. Then, the Blackmore family cranked out its wares by hand.

Nowadays, the company's state-of-the-art factory pumps out more than 2 billion minerals, vitamins and herb pills a year, and was recently named most trusted vitamins and supplements brand by Reader's Digest for the eighth year running.

One of Blackmores' early Brisbane laboratories

Blackmores is often dubbed a vitamin company, a description Marcus dismisses as too limited.

"I think there are far greater results to be achieved through the use of minerals and herbs than vitamins," Blackmore said.

"My father practiced as a naturopath and he rarely used vitamins. His focus was on minerals and herbs."

That focus was "not popular in those days," said his son — "but now, everybody goes to doctors with cramps and they get magnesium."

It's just one instance where Blackmore says his father was well ahead of health trends, notably the "no sugar" fever that's gripped clean eating-istas.

"My father would never allow white sugar," he said. "We did of course have cakes and lollies and chocolate from time to time, but he would never have allowed mum to have free-flowing sucrose in the house. He said 'It is poison'. And this was 60 years ago."

Nor did Blackmore snr permit white bread, long before most people knew anything about the importance of complex carbohydrates and whole grains.

"You need whole grain bread," said Blackmore. "Once you process the grain you take all the big complex vitamins out of it and so on."

He acknowledges that though general interest in wellness and the complementary health industry have grown, that doesn't mean the population is healthier overall — which is confirmed by a glance at Australia's worrying obesity statistics.

Blackmore blames that partly on the government allowing the food industry to dictate food labelling, resulting in labels that are "the most confusing bloody of things all the time" to the average person.

"[The label] tells you how much protein and carbohydrates — what the hell does that actually mean?" he said. "Tell me how much sugar you added in there. Tell me what preservatives you’re using, [not] a whole bunch of numbers."

He also blames the usual suspects: poor eating habits, sedentary jobs and a lack of exercise.

"Nature’s natural philosophy is getting the body to heal itself and the body can only heal itself by reproducing new cells, which it does millions at a time," he said. "But it can only do that in blood supply, and we know blood supply is absolutely a function of exercise."

Sponsored by Blackmores, the annual Sydney Running Festival is a major event on the fitness calendar (AAP)

But Blackmore is upbeat about the future of health, particularly the increasing attention on gut health — the interplay of the microorganisms living inside your intestines, which medical science suggests could impact every other system or your body.

"We’re going to see more and more research in that space," Blackmore said. "You can take all the bloody vitamins in the world, but if your gut’s not healthy and you’re not absorbing them you are wasting your time."